What Is TikTok AI Alive & How Do You Use The New Feature?

Whether you like it or not, artificial intelligence is slowly becoming a part of everyone's day-to-day life. For instance, if you spend a lot of time researching stuff online, then you must have seen the AI Overview, which is a Google search feature that uses AI to provide concise answers to your queries. Though it's possible to disable it, considering how easy it makes it to find answers on the internet, you really wouldn't want it to turn off. Social media platforms are also not behind in the AI race. Platforms like Instagram and Facebook have Meta AI that you can use to generate text and images and get quick answers to your queries.

Now, TikTok, another popular social media platform, has released an AI feature called AI Alive that allows you to convert static photos into videos. This can be considered an upgrade to the text-to-image generation capability that was introduced to the platform back in 2022. That said, the AI Alive feature can only be used in TikTok Stories. For instance, if you have a static photo of clouds, you can use the feature to convert it into a short-form video, like making the clouds move.

As aforementioned, the AI Alive feature only works along with the TikTok Story feature. So, to use it, you need to access the Story camera on TikTok and choose the photo from your gallery that you want to convert into a short-form video. Then, all you need to do is tap the AI Alive icon that appears on the right sidebar. Though the feature has a default prompt that says, "Make this photo come alive," you also have the option to personalize the prompt to give a personal touch to the generated video. Once the video is generated, you can then post it as a TikTok Story.

The downside of introducing such features is that some notorious people can use them to generate content that you would definitely not want to see on social media. That's why TikTok will carefully monitor the uploaded photo, the prompt, as well as the generated video before it is shown to the creator. Furthermore, you also have the option to report an AI Alive-generated video if you think it's inappropriate and shouldn't be on TikTok.

TikTok will add an AI-generated label to the generated video so that other people know that it has been generated using AI. Furthermore, all the videos that you'll produce using this feature will come embedded with C2PA metadata. If you aren't aware, it's a technical standard that ensures that even if the content is downloaded and shared on different platforms, people can easily verify its origin and find other information related to it, such as that it has been generated using AI and isn't real.